Entertainment

Forget Adam and Eve; Minecraft now has Alex and Steve

When millions of new players first loaded up Minecraft, they didn't have many character options. You could only select a variant of Steve, a blocky fellow in a blue shirt who has become one of the iconic figures of the game.

But that changes on Wednesday, as developer Mojang rolls out its first default female character, Alex. After all, "jolly old Steve doesn’t really represent the diversity of our player base," Mojang spokesperson Owen Hill wrote in a blog post.

Players have the option of picking from various mods and skins to deck out their characters, with some from popular shows or movies. (The Simpsons got their own skins earlier this year.) But that all comes much later in the game. This means every new player has the option of picking between Alex and Steve, each with a variety of different skin tones and hair colors, right off the bat.

PC players had access to Alex since last year, but this update affects all of Minecraft's platforms on Wednesday: Xbox One, Xbox 360, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 3 and PlayStation Vita.

Mojang was purchased by Microsoft for $2.5 billion in September, and at the time, the company had reportedly sold 54 million copies of the game across several platforms. That number has doubtlessly grown as the next-gen versions take hold.

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